Naturists, “sans-culottes who say shit to the world and roast in the sun”. Their story, her story, Margaux Cassan, philosopher and biographer of Paul Ricœur, tells it, talented, in live naked. Her summers in Bélézy, a village in the Vaucluse that is home to a naturist Eden, her dress taken off in the car park, the final stage before the delights of a pine forest explored with her buttocks in the air, the lines of the skin caressed by the breeze, those that the mosquito will come, in the evening, to sting.
Uncle Anselme and his wrinkled belly, repeating refusing meat, sugar and textiles, Aunt Jeannette, heavy-chested, drinking her kefir, Cousin Robinson’s pranks and the grandmother showing off her only breast, the survivor of a mastectomy, all feet burnt on the pebbles, inhaling the perfume of the elderberries; in the distance the peacock parades. “I may delve into my childhood memories, I find it difficult to imagine them dressed,” writes the 30-year-old, recalling that two and a half million French people practice today.
If nudists flirt on the beach, naturists militate, “a philosophy and a practice”, she says, nature revered, cajoled, and nudity as a means, a subterfuge, in order to experience the benefits as well as the requirements. Their modesty, she demonstrates with benevolence, is a paradox, a hospitable exhibition of bodies, of all bodies precisely, the old, the ugly, the dashing, the tonic and this frankness would prevent eroticism because it reverses the modesty. A family utopia, the intoxicating freedom of which Margaux Cassan explores with finesse the contradictions and the revolutionary candor, because what does nudity say in a time prudish and obsessed with the body? The thirty-year-old also recounts her embarrassment, adolescence and this foreign body, the comrades to whom she tells, benoîte, her holidays among the “zizis in the air”, and then, the lust, the troubled looks, and this stay in the island of the Levant, where naturism invites licentiousness.
Around this childhood story, the story of a movement, its origins and its political wanderings. 19th century, Sebastian Kneipp, a Bavarian doctor who claims to cure everything with cold water, the Frenchman Paul Carton, an anti-Semitic reactionary, the anarchist phalansteries, free love and rejection of private property, then the revival invigorated by the 1970s, finally, today, the last fires, vestiges of an egalitarian world, where “the naturist undresses to remove the superfluous between him and the others”. Bélézy has been sold, transformed into a holiday club. Entrance fee and dressed.
live naked
by Margaux Cassan.
Grasset, 216 pages, €19.